Dave McNamee: Application Development

New Portal Efforts

Fri, 15 Aug 2003 15:19:01 GMT

I am assisting key stakeholders from different State agencies in building a new State Enterprise Employee Portal project. The project team has not yet been formed, but we have a pretty good idea of who needs to be involved. Obviously DHRM and Finance have a major stake in this project, so their involvement will be extensive. No employee portal would be complete without the services that those organizations provide. I am very excited about this new effort, because, unlike previous efforts, it is being driven by business owners rather than by technologists. Also, it has the support of the CIO and will become a fully sanctioned enterprise project if we do things right.

Meantime, other "portal" projects are in search of direction. Public Safety has a couple of efforts that could benefit greatly from solid enterprise strategy for portals. This strategy does not exist yet. I hope to help pull people to solve this portal meta issue. It is possible that we could create economies of scale with portal efforts, and at the same time work towards integrated presentation of services provided by State government.

SPML: Open Standards User Provisioning

Fri, 18 Jul 2003 17:51:28 GMT

Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) is getting good press for its ability to automate user provisioning accross multiple systems. I would really like to see the State implement SAML, SPML, and other emerging standards for security and identity in the future, after they mature a bit.

Organized RSS

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 13:04:59 GMT

RSS is a powerful content aggregation tool. It is useful in more applications than just blogging. At ITS, we have developed an RSS tool that will make it available to state agencies for creating things like press releases, articles on www.utah.gov and on business.utah.gov, the new doing business in Utah portal and soon to be the home of One-Stop Business Registration. This RSS tool is called news.utah.gov.

News.utah.gov is not intended to be a blogging tool for personal weblogs, however it works in much the same way as a personal weblog. It is based on the Movable Type blogging platform, but again, it is not intended to be a blogging tool. The types of news feeds that are out there now are things like "Utah Business News," which is being consumed right now on busines.utah.gov. Control over the feeds that are created will be very strict.

News.utah.gov is also an example of a project that used existing code bases to develop an effective application that can run in an inexpensive environment. The environment this is running in is a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) environment. ITS should be adding LAMP to its hosting product portfolio this year. I am the hosting product manager, so I will be working towards that end.

Websphere Portal

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 20:27:37 GMT

Well, I worked on a long blog entry to describe the Websphere portal server demo, and clicked the wrong button and lost it all. Sorry. If you want details on it, please let me know.

Suffice it to say that it looks pretty good. I didn't notice any features that were obviously missing. It seems to have everything that Novell's exteNd product has, with the addition of a powerful development tool, WS studio. It also integrates with existing systems. Again, email me if you want more info.

Websphere Studio Demo

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 19:34:38 GMT

Still at the IBM demo. Before lunch, they showed us the new Websphere studio developer tools. Based on open-source eclipse, WS studio is pretty impressive. They did side by side comparisons, or competitions between WS studio and MS Visual Studio. They did four tasks:

Change a presentation layer
Create an EJB
Create and publish a web service
Integrate with CICS and COBOL on the mainframe.

Of course, it's a planned demo, but they did get the message across that WS studio is a one-stop development tool. Depending on the version you buy, you can use WS studio for systems integration development accross many platforms.

One cool thing is that it is open source based, and Java development is done based on struts. It is an attractive tool, especially in light of the fact that we have a lot of legacy systems that could be web-enabled without migrating them off of the mainframe.

RSS for State Government Sites

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 16:43:57 GMT

RSS is a very powerful tool. It makes it possible for site owners to syndicate their content, as well as consume the syndicated content from other sources. If agencies created RSS feeds and consumed each other's feeds, information would be more readily available and it would be a good thing.

Intrepid managers of State IT efforts recognize the value of RSS. Dave Fletcher is working to make the creation of RSS simple for agencies. Also, Utah Interactive is in the process of developing a new State business portal, which will feature RSS feeds from various agencies.

RSS is powerful because it makes content available while still allowing site administrators the freedom to decide how the content will be presented. It makes the process of sharing content free from human interaction. Anyone could take the URL http://radio.weblogs.com/0110870/rss.xml and subscribe to the RSS feed for this weblog. The content is there, available for any parser that speaks RSS 1.0 to consume, process, and post on any other site. This is done without actually having to download the content onto the consuming server.

I have an opinion on how the State should approach RSS, which I will share with you here.

I believe that RSS will not achieve its full potential on State websites unless agencies catch the vision and actually create and host the feeds themselves on their web servers. We should sell agencies on the virtures of RSS, and help them create the feeds and post them on their servers. We should also help agencies determine how they would like to consume RSS on their own sites. If we simply create a centralized RSS server and ask agencies to put their press releases there, they will never go beyond that. It will simply be a content contribution system. If that is what we want, then we may as well just have the agencies email the content to a site administrator, because even with RSS, someone ought to look at the content before it is posted.

If they catch the vision of RSS and create and manage their own feeds, then the value of RSS is preserved. No middle piece would be needed to create the feeds for them or manage where they went. It would be pure, powerful RSS. I think using the business portal project as a test case for this would be a good thing.

Anyway, that's my $0.02.

UII and Co-Loc

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 14:16:02 GMT

Yesterday I attended a joint ACIO/Product Management Council meeting. The topic was the renewal of the Utah Interactive contract and web hosting in general. For those unfamiliar with the history of web development in the State of Utah over the past 4 years, Utah Interactive, Inc (called UII by most state folks, UI by those who work there) has been responsible for a large amount of progress towards getting services online. They basically own and run the Utah.gov portal, and they have successfully created 70+ web applications for a multitude of state agencies. They have done a lot of great work in a time where there really wasn't anyone else to fill that void.

Well, their 4 year contract expires sometime in May, and the discussion at the meeting yesterday centered around renewing the contract, and on where their applications will live. Today, all UII apps live in their own facility. ITS attempted unsuccessfully last year to migrate their apps to our iPlanet environment. UII uses Linux. In order to bring those apps into a more controlled environment, it has been decided that colocation is the best option. UII will bring their servers to ITS' data center where they will enjoy world-class environmental, network, and power facilities, not to mention physical security. I think this is the right thing to do. I also believe that renewing the UII contract is a wise decision, however, in order for eGovernment to mature, changes need to be made to our relationship with UII. I believe that the relationship should be more customer (the state)/contractor (UII) rather than partner/partner. I'm not discounting the value of what they have done, nor do I think our relationship should end, I'd just like to see the state take charge of its eGovernment destiny instead of outsourcing it.

Using Flash to Make a Point

Fri, 30 Aug 2002 20:57:27 GMT

One of the coolest technologies that I have worked with in my short IT career is Flash. You can do some really cool stuff, but maintain a small filesize. Steve Stalter at ITS has done some neat stuff with flash. Phil talks about the value of flash demos in today's blog:

On another note: building a little 60 second flash demo of a GUI based software product is pretty cheap and it needn't be slick to make its point (as the above demo demonstrates [which would indicate its a demo and a metademo]). As a CIO with responsibility for a large IT budget, you can imagine how much marketing material I see every single day. Most of it I throw away or delete unopened. When something does catch my eye, I'm frequently amazed at how hard it is to get a good understanding of what a product actually does. Most web sites are collections of marketing material which is dumbed down to the point of giving the curious no idea what the company or product really does. Seems pretty stupid to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get me and people like me just to spend a few moments looking at your product and then not do a good job of communicating what it does.

Phil's Thoughts on Barriers to Open Source

Fri, 26 Jul 2002 16:57:53 GMT

Here are some of Phil's thoughts on open source. Brought to you through an XML RSS feed.

Barriers to Open Source in Government.

We didn't get a chance to really talk about the barriers to using open source in government at our panel, so I decided at least, I'd post them here for anyone who's interested. Broadly, they fall into (1) technical issues, (2) perception issues, and (3) cultural issues. Of the three, the last is the most difficult to overcome. Here are some specifics:

Sales droids. I could spend all day every day talking to salespeople from one company or another. Some of them are quite useful to me from an educational standpoint and some of them aren't. They all want to be my partner, but being a "partner" with your local sales rep is the way CIO's lose there jobs or, worse, go to jail. But the point is, there are no open source salespeople. They don't come knocking on the doors of the many people in my organization the way the salespeople from IBM, Oracle, Sun, and on and on and on do. Thus, unless you're really trying, open source is not top of mind.
Consultants. Governments don't, as a rule, develop software. They hire consultants to develop software. Consultants don't make money selling me open source solutions. They make money reselling me software and then customizing it. So, if you want open source in government, you've got to penetrate the consultant camp.
No OS culture. As an example, there is at least one IT person in the state who started working for the state of Utah before I was born (and I'm not that young). There are many more like him with almost the same tenure. These people are smart and know their stuff. May of them started out in mainframes and have made the jump to UNIX or something else. Still, their mindset is to buy from the vendors they know---not go out on google or freshmeat and search for some open source software.
Risk. As an example, consider StarOffice. I've been a StarOffice user for quite a while. Still, I have to admit its a chore sometimes. And even if I factor out the parts of the chore that would go away if all my co-workers used StarOffice, its got some bumps. Changing a software product like the office suite causes lots of grief no matter what. Using something like StarOffice though would likely unleash a hailstorm of blame on the decision to use something that wasn't mainstream. No one's going to fire me or anyone else for using Office. You can only fight so may battles and I've fought my share.
IT Lobbying (or the lack thereof). I did mention this one in the panel session. The fact is, that IT companies as a whole are very naive when it comes to government. They are not present in proportion to the size of the industry---not even close. Like it or not, lobbyists serve an important educational role in government. Legislators identify issues that are worth their time, in some cases, by lobbying action. They learn the issues and decide to explore further. Without this, they're unlikely to spend a lot of time. We will lose every single important congressional and legislative battle unless the IT industry wakes up and recognizes this fact.

I did get in a few licks for my Principals for Enabling Web Services, which I view as an important mandate for making government system interoperate and making the open, if not built on open source. The fact is that the best tools for building open system are open source. I made mention of the article in the Circuits section of the NY Times yesterday on privacy. This section is particularly interesting and apropos:

Waqaas Fahmawi, 25, used to sign petitions freely when he was in college. "In the past you would physically sign a petition and could confidently know that it would disappear into oblivion," said Mr. Fahmawi, a Palestinian-American who works as an economist for the Commerce Department.

But after he discovered that his signatures from his college years had been archived on the Internet, he became reluctant to sign petitions for fear that potential employers would hold his political views again him.

He feels stifled in his political expression. "The fact I have to think about this," he said, "really does show we live in a system of thought control."

Our government is based on open records. If these petitions aren't public, how could government work? This is the very thing that should be public. I'm afraid that just because someone has the expectation of privacy, we'll have to give it to them whether its right or not. Freedom of expression is NOT the same as freedom from consequences of that expression. Test

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Application Development

Wed, 24 Jul 2002 19:21:04 GMT

I'm glad you took the time to read my blog on Application Development (hereinafter refered to as appdev). I hope that you will come back often and find the information useful.

Here's the current scoop on the appdev product family, broken down into two categories (webappdev and nonwebappdev):

First of all, webappdev is a product that I have significant experience in, having worked for Kerry for about two years. Although I have not yet had the time to address it, the webappdev product is one of the most mature products at ITS. Kerry and his people have made great and successful efforts to develop the product. I look forward to expanding my relationship with Darcie's group and to continuing to work with Kerry's group, and I hope I can help make the product(s) more successful and self-supporting.

Secondly, nonwebappdev. I don't yet know anything about appdev. Honest. I am wondering if some of the stuff Darcie's group does could fall in this category?

Again, please refer to this blog often, and I look forward to working with you.